I've been playing a lot of Civ lately. And I mean a lot. It's one of those games that, if it *clicks* with you, hijacks entire epochs of your life; just for it to fade into obscurity for a while, and then come back once again even stronger. I was watching some lectures about Ancient Greece for another article during The Great Cold I had in November, and I could feel the clock ticking in my brain, the sparse thoughts about civilizations coalesce into a revelation about life itself: "Let's just play just one game." A month later here I am still, chasing barbarians with Rome every night until five in the morning.
One of these nights, I came up with a plan. I usually go into games blind, without knowing what will I do and how will I play, adapting to my surroundings and random events. But not this time. I created an Immortal game (second to highest difficulty) with Scythia with a strategy in mind I came up with and wanted to try. Let me explain.
The high difficulties in this game are not against "smarter" opponents. Because I guess getting a bunch of AI (at least algorithmic ones) to play this game in an actual high level must the stuff of nightmares. Instead, they are regular AI with some mild static bonuses and more importantly a huge head-start. So if you do nothing, and just play a regular game, they will stat-check you with science or military numbers; you are playing catch up against someone that runs faster than you. There are several ways to combat this, most of them are about exploiting some of the more glaring weakness with their design: diplomacy, combat and long-term planning. The usual strategy is to rush some technology about early war, spam units, conquering your neighbor and settling everything in your vicinity and his former empire, then bulking yourself with districts and declaring yourself a reconverted pacifist until, in the lategame, your carefully constructed empire starts to boom outpacing the others, when your good planning for the future starts to actually pile up. Then you either colonize mars, spam tourism or nuke the shit out of them all and punish them for their digital sins (like building stupid stuff like a trebuchet instead of yet another market).
And I wanted none of that.
My plan was to make an early military rush and to eventually SimCity everyone, yes. But I wouldn't do it conquering anyone or expanding a lot beyond my reaches. I wanted to make a horseman rush, using the unique ability of my nomad western Iranian civilization, with makes a duplicate of each light cavalry unit you produce, to make early war and promote them into efficient raiders without actually conquering any cities. Then, spend the rest of the game improving and using them to make my enemies into pinatas I could raid over and over to fund the rapid development of my cities in the mainland; bypassing the need of a large empire. That strategy has some benefits and caveats against actual conquest.
First, benefits. I don't need to conquer cities so I don't need many archers (just the few to actually defend myself and fight early war) or any siege units. The plan is to make my investment into war early and then forget about it spare punctual upgrades when my horseman units need to form corps and then armadas. Also, because I don't need to take cities I can be more mobile and don't have the risk to get stuck in any particular point. Also I won't need to worry about maintaining them or keeping them loyal. Once I get rolling, raiding now led to more raiding later, because not only I get stuff the other guy has to repair everything afterwards leaving them crippled so I can come back a couple hundred years later and do it again.
Second, caveats. Every unit is irreplaceable because the promotions are individual, so I have to fight without getting them killed, which is a problem. Also I will need a shitlot of horses in the earlygame (we will talk about this later). Other civilizations with actual defenses like anti-cavalry and early ranged attacks can fuck me over, specially early, so I have to find civilizations that are easier to raid that let me do it in some kind of order. I can do excursions far into the world because of my mobility but if I waste too much time getting from one target to another I will lose the race towards technological improvements that I need to keep up my horses against more and more sophisticated defenses. So, I need some kind of a "route" I can adapt or expand depending on circumstances (like opportunistically raiding someone who is in a conquest war somewhere else) so I can make time until the civilizations I raid can regenerate themselves so I can raid them again later. Also everybody will be very mad at me. Which actually happens anyway. In fact they might like me more diplomatically than usual, because even when I am literally raging all over the place I am not taking cities. The deity-like leaders of this game like wars like I like essays: derivative, abstract, conceptual, with lots of drama but not actually having much impact in the real world. And the largest problem, obviously, is that the early rush towards horseman and posterior production will get me even more behind than usual. Super behind. I haven't mentioned it until now because, well, is kind of a given. The whole game is built on that assumption.
When you prepare for war in Civ producing units or researching technologies on the tech tree that let them build them, or in the civics tree where you search for idiosyncratic ideas related to your goal, or actually do anything at all, that has a cost (let it be production, gold, faith, whatever) that has to be paid.
And that can be measured. But the real cost you are paying and has to be abstractly measured is in fact the opportunity cost. Not only the immediate costs of effects of the other things you can do now (which can be sort of compared) but the vast network of ramifications of those other actions. That's the real game. That only can be understood in an abstract way, but you still have to make definite decisions about it. Immediate ones. Decisions that lead steadfast into an specific version of an uncertain future.
I hope you see where this is leading.
You are in the middle of a green field. To the north there's a sea, to the east a river, the west plains with some mountains, to the south the unknown. You see only some in the horizon. It's 4000BC. You part ways with the warrior that made you company all this time until you had the great idea to start a civilization, you have great ideas, plans, dreams for it. Of conquest, of raiding, of flight. See that green hexagon? That's there eventually we will put Broadway. But for now you unpack your things, name your first city, and a fundamental question opens up. A question the human race has struggled with since the dawn of time.
"Do I build a scout or a slinger?"
So you open up your computer, and google about early game builds. No luck. There's lots of people that seem what they are talking about with widely different opinions. Some of them run websites that seem to be founded in the early two thousands, and still they don't know. Some dare make bold assertions about the matter. In my opinion, those who are certain of any particular answer are making a colossal mistake, no matter what the answer is. Sometimes to be totally confused is the correct play. They try to untie the Gordian knot with definite action, like Alexander, which is fair, and maybe better than losing yourself into a list of circumstantial possibilities that eventually derive into a flowchart that eventually derive into existential crisis for every small decision you have to take. But it's still wrong. For my specific case, there seem to be two curses of action.
Scout -> Slinger -> Slinger -> Settler -> Builder
Slinger -> Slinger -> Settler -> Monument -> Builder
There are a lot more, but we will stick to that. There some things I need from my super early game, the most important probably being horses. In order to figure out where horses are in the map, I need to research the technology that allows me to see them (not that they just appear, but how am I supposed to know these specific mammals are relevant or useful if I don't know what domestication is) because that's the logic of the game. Once I know where they are I need a settler to make a city near them, and then a builder to actually make some pastures so I can start accumulating horses as fast as possible to have enough for the eventual building of actual units about a couple thousand years from now. I will also need a great general for early war, so eventually an encampment. To do that I will need some things like a government and some important military policies (the monument helps with those) and in order to research those I need to perform certain actions that provide a boost towards them. Specifically I need to defeat a barbarian camp, meet at least three city states and defeat three barbarian units, one of them with a slinger. Also, I need someone to go to war to eventually, and archers to defend myself until them. Exploring gets a little murkier later, but early I need to scout possible areas for raiding later and to fish for some tribal camps that can give me free stuff or steal some workers from an unsuspecting city. Also I need to actually find those city states and barbarian camps. An slinger can also scout, but it's not very good at it. An scout can also fight, but it's not so good at it. I can speed some build using gold, but my income will be low and dependent on luck, so I would like to not depend on it and instead use it opportunistically. All of this should also be timed together quite close, because the clock of my enemies inevitably improving their defenses is ticking. If I get everything, horses, great general, an enemy to wage early war with, relevant government and social polices but don't hit all the ingredients in more or less the same time, I am dead in the water. If I can't boost, I don't know, fucking Foreign Trade for whatever reason, that's about four turns of culture that do down the drain (depending on game speed) and four turns I am not capitalizing to cover my gargantuan expenses and setbacks of the sterile infrastructure-wise easy game.
On first glance, the choice between scout and slinger seems to be a question of stability (slinger) against opportunism (scout). But it's not that clear cut. If I don't scout far away lands, I will have to gamble during with my decisions later about where to actually go to war. Also, to not build an scout is to hope that city-states are close-by and will be found almost on accident by my warrior or slingers, which is not a given. Even if everything goes right with slingers, nothing assures me I will have the gold to upgrade them into archers, and scouting can help with that. Also the possibility of some random buffs like finding a natural wonder or a relic are really enticing. In both cases, the opportunity cost is tremendous. And any presupposing I could make about the game or the map can also be wrong. I could be on an island. There could be no horses. A meteorite could wipe me out in the first turn of play. Who knows. Stability is opportunism, opportunism is stability. Another way to see the decision is in terms of power now (slinger) against power later (scout) but that's also limiting in some important ways. The earlier slinger can help me against barbarians, that's true, but that gives me a security towards other things I can do that are more greedy or more long-time. On the other hand, playing long-term gives me an edge of inevitability, which is actually a threat in the short term; other players have to react and put themselves into disadvantageous situations and playing less efficiently to punish you, thereby giving you a position of power now. In lower difficulties, this game can be played (like many strategy games) with the premise that you win out-planning the opponent, going for the long term play, being efficient. You get your economy going, build towers and walls. Some players live or die by that premise. Here, they are in a death-cult, because to win you have to actually stand out. Power now is power later. Power later is power now.
There's ideology there, in that immediate choice. Bogus concepts about what society is or should be. Ancient debates about modes of organization and the tension between individual agency and collective goals that seem very modern, but have been present in our world even before the first tine two people joined forces and decided to exclude a third. Maybe even before the first multicellular being was born. Maybe it even comes as a bizarre consequence of the universe tendency towards lowering entropy. Wouldn't that be poetic. When we get lost into the mist of super long term consequences, we have to drop calculations and embrace concepts that seem pedantic about culture and empires. Even that's not enough. Deep down, it's not even a pure utilitarian choice about how to win the game. We want to win the game, but only because that's fun. Winning it's an instrumental or surrogate goal towards something else we can't quite explain. Me, personally, am interested in any particular game not only as that but as a story to be told, as an enticing narrative, and my choices are also influenced by personal archetypes of my personality and decision making that permeate everything I do. From chasing the grandeur of an epic war of conquest to trying an unusual strategy. In the microcosm of a single decision lies a whole galaxy of who I am and the whole history of the world to guide me through a prestablished notion of concepts like honor and destiny. These warriors and conquerors, builders and destroyers of empires, inventors and dramatists that made their cultures stand the test of time; did they think of that when making their lives? I watch and read a ton of stuff about history. And some part of me thinks they did. Some of them definitely had. But some of them, they were just painting the tapestry of their life, and that just happened to somewhat echo in eternity. A book is written about Napoleon Bonaparte each week. My thinking is that they were essentially replicating, towards the big and towards the small, problem-solving patterns subtly inherited through storytelling. That the decision of invading Russia or not is directly tied to someones decision to build a slinger or a scout way back. But that's just a guess. Perhaps the best way to think about if they took deliberate action towards an abstract notion of history, knowing that history expands outwards and the impact of a single man gets reverberated into the infinite only forever growing in importance, is to think if we do. Because that's also true to us.
Anyway.
So I sat there, staring blankly into the screen of the newly created game for about half an our. And then I took a non-decision. Let's just pick one of the two and try it out. After I'm done with this game, I will come back and pick the other. I started to build an scout and delved into the unknown. What followed was an epic game in which my strategy was successful, not without significant events, setbacks and a myriad of posterior equally hard decisions to make. Entire empires fell. Significant events happened that would have been very different if not by some small edge. I closed the game, satisfied. I never went back to that file. Never picked the other option. I wonder what would had happened.
In a way, I knew I wouldn't go back to that save file. My non-decision was a complete and final decision, and I just had to protect myself from responsibility and intent from it's ramifications. It's in those where the real meat and potatoes of what constitutes a decision are, when we don't fully understand where they come from, where they are decided "almost" at random (almost being the key word here) but bifurcate the entire history of the world. What influences them are those invisible and strange strings of casual causality, an universe of subconscious preferences we can't access.
One possibility could had been that I was right, and that the decision changed everything completely, and another different game and world history unfolded from that, an infinite ripple of consequences producing a different universe. The other possibility could had been that differences would had existed, but that at the end of the day, my nomad civilization would had still raided everything like I had planned to do, that my neighbors still would had been opportunistically weakened by some random (albeit different from the original) stupid forever-war between them, and that history would had been more or less the same with some minor changes that actually matter but substituted others that did before in a sort of pseudodeterministic equilibrium. That would also make me right. We live in a world where the two coexist in constant conflict. Often we (I mean, in this blog) travel the way from small decisions into the grand scheme of things, the butterfly effects of everything. Also often, do we travel the way from the grand into the small, both from reductionist and emergent approaches. But we have a distinct incapacity to tie the two together. The world seems to be infinite both ways, indistinct of scale, a fractal tree of story-lines, no matter if you are leading your troops to battle in some god-forsaken centuries to determine the actual fate of the world or choosing what flavor of chips you will get from the stand. After all assuming that history is just a particularly long a messy chain of causations is not wrong per se but an incredible impractical and naive way to look at it. Infinity goes both ways. In a single decision, I see a whole game. In a single game, I see the whole of life. At the same time, whole of life itself is a single decision. It's not that a raindrop contains an inward universe (which is true). Is that the conflicts present in the raindrop are in essence the whole exterior universe itself. Sometimes it happens to me that I am trying to solve a particular seemingly inane problem or answer a question and as I explore the topic it seems to first narrow and narrow into something until it explodes and I realize I am trying to solve the cosmos itself.
Lately, I've been thinking more and more, about the limitations of our conceptualization of reality. I've been thinking about dualisms, generalization, reductionism, about the intrinsic limitations of human language. The point of explosion of complexity seems to be at the edge of every house of knowledge we build, of every topic we explore, of every deconstruction; and for the sake of any particular argument, a narrative force or the intrinsec promise of enriching conclusions makes us ignore the violent cosmic blizzard out there, that you can see if you move a bit the curtains. And it's not that there's some things we don't quite understand "out there". We are standing in that maelstrom. We have constructed somewhat useful solutions to practical problems in there. But I can't stop looking through the window.
This is a Sierpinski triangle:
A fractal is an structure that is independent of scale.
Someone.
Independent of scale. Not only that implies that it goes both directions, it implies that the intuition driven characteristic of an "structure" as an "object" with a point of reference is obsolete. The structure contains itself, and as such the maximum expression or minimum expression you can imagine of it (or start with) holds no special place in the structure itself. That preference is only human convenience, from the point we "started" to see it. All the ideas about the game, from the overall magnanimous strategy I started with to the small decision, are in their own way just another scale of the same structure. A superseding one can be also the fact that it's me, in a room, in a computer playing the game, and that's it's own scale, the significance of my decisions and even the decision itself to play and the role of that in my life and the game of games I am playing is just another scale from which to see the fractal from. And in it's own way, the entirety of my life is another scale of another game played by bigger entities we can't see more than the poor settler can see about who is playing the game he is in. And it goes on and on. But the important thing is, the microscopic decision contains everything outside of it, no matter how impossible is for the agents that play it to see.
Scout or slinger.
When you play a lot of Civ (at least it happened to me) you start to see history differently, not even through ambiental deterministic glasses, but also through game theory ones. Interestingly, there are some times during the game, from the stone age to the future, where producing units is kind of the only useful thing you can actually do, so it's not that hurting to do so. In fact, it's hurting not to do so. Because another civilization that does will eat you up. Those windows of opportunity in a game retroactively (I don't know if it's intended or not) explain the periods of great wars and others eras of the world in different places. Historic patters emerge from the configuration of the game. None has programmed a button that says "raid the neighbor" or whatever. I am describing holistic strategies, not game mechanics (that need for, obvious small programmable actions, like raid an specific tile). I am meeting historical events, cultural idiosyncrasies of entire nations, not as a descriptive explanation but as stable game solutions for a culture to thrive and survive. You start to see systems of incentives. You start to see pathways towards necessary immediate power that lead to useful collective pathos and ethos towards the future, and others that were lost along the way. We are the way we are, think how we think, because that way of thinking produces stable societies over time with the right amount of gradient incentives towards progress and adaptability, and even those have to be circumstantial enough to subvert themselves from time to time.
I am reading this book, about spawn locations in Civ and their importance in the mid-lategame. It's just that the author doesn't know it yet, he thinks it's about the real world. It's called "Guns, Germs and Steel". I am not finished yet, but it seems to be obsessed by the material consequences of ambiental differences in proto-civilizations, where I am more about the whole "ideas" stuff. Would have been important that Greece had land to cultivate and seas to sail to if their people didn't develop a broad cultural substrate that made them to actually adopt those things from the middle east and Anatolia, but still change and iterate upon them? The technological gradient has to exist, of course, but it's not nearly enough. And I don't mean "develop" with an inherent "towards the positive" sense, or towards more complexity. In fact, a less developed sense of own idiosyncrasy possibly is a positive trait towards that sort of acceptance towards exterior technologies and ideas. There's no "progression" towards a preestablished end, unlike in the game, where cultural traits lead invariably towards greatness. One could argue that, given the favorable conditions, even if the people that lived there didn't adopt agriculture (or any other particular advance, both completely unrelated or a granular part of it) others that were more willing to would had eventually migrated towards that land and colonized it, and these people would be to us the new "Greeks" or "Archeans" of whatever. That's actually not far from what happened. But also, at the same time, that group would had need to be flexible towards the idea of who they were. If they were from too far, they would had no attachment to that land, or if they were too firm on "them" being from another place, they maybe would not had remained there and defended it with their lives. Maybe forgetfulness is a powerful cultural weapon there, also the lack of a written record. Because the attachment with a land and a sense of ownership and self-identity are not separated from their late military might. The same idea of a phalanx is born from the embers of their political identity. It's not just a matter of if there is bronze or iron nearby, or if enough heads have leisure time from manual labor. It seems to me, that the most important is the timing of cultural instantiations with challenges offered by unpredictable forces. A timing that is both a matter of luck, and not of "better" or more "just" ideas, and inevitable given a certain period of time and diverse configurations. Maybe lots of combinations are possible, albeit they all offer, once started, wildly different timelines of technological progress. A progress that can come in series of bursts and stagnations, in which ones that are unfortunate enough to meet with some other that happens to be more advanced gets pruned from existence. Power now is power later. There's not much that makes me think that we are somehow the extreme example of a sane long-term society, the main reason to think we are in fact the opposite is the fact that we have actually survived. Such delicate time-sensitive long-term empire-wide strategies can only come from both as a pure combinatoric fluke of history (explain through the anthropic principle) and the guide of some mysterious outside force: like god, extraterrestrial patreons or intuitive mirroring of social schema through different scales. What I have explained before is the meta way to beat the game in high difficulties, probably is what is actually meta in the real world. Conquer your neighbors until your natural borders and then act like if nothing happened behind closed walls. Bulk up and then redefine what "natural borders" are. Repeat. The ideosincratic ideas that made modern nations possible and stable are either the reason they became such or a techno-cultural development from that process. Nations don't start from scratch. What characterizes them is not independent of them being that. We are the repurposed cultural remains of that murderous tribe, that started doing it since that level of conflict meant to steal a berry from someone else's cave. Societies have found ways to built from that substrate stable configurations, and to use the vigor that came from them into advantageous weapons (in the largest sense of the word) during all sorts of different times. Is in their idiosyncrasies and systematic incentives to groups of population where you will find the secret ingredient to their destiny, not in historical drama. Which you can only find through historical drama. And that advances through and bifurcates paths through that. Welcome to my historic deterministic nightmare.
Of course, all of this is relative because the game is different from real life.
It's not even intended to be a simulation. But if you ask me, it works as a simulation specifically because of that. The game is deterministic in it's core, albeit in an strange way. I am not talking about lack of randomness, which the game has plenty of, but instead of a "deterministic idiosyncrasy". The technology tree is established and clear cut. You can actually plan for nukes from the ancient era. The civilizations you pick to play, in the name of flavor, already have their characteristics defined; and even if some necessary leeway is left to circumstances, their behavior already aligned with some solutions to the problem of "how do we survive". The same concept of what actually is a civilization is preprogrammed from the standpoint of a clear cut entity of an almighty national God, and the continuity of this hard-coded concept of unified and distinct "state" is a product of the triumph of the idea of the nation (but was not in ancient times). There is no "winning" in real life. Neither losing. One could argue that both Jerusalem and Athens are still the reigning cultures of our time, and their survival as cultural entities is not tied to the geopolitical importance of the powers that once created them.
In the end, how unlikely is that playing as the Scythians, without any intent of role-playing, I have stumbled upon basically the same behaviors and strategies? These are not things that are coded in the game itself (even if envisioned by it's creators). Imagine you are one of these AI civilizations, thriving in your culture and science, developing an empire surrounding an interior sea, only for a horde of what you think are barbarians that have beelined strange and niche forms of horseman technology like stirrups and based all their culture towards aggression and not upheld and at the same time not constrained by ideological or martial or honor-based ideas (that in their own can be seen as utilitarian practical abstractions derived from a world-wide interconnected competitive prisoners dilemma's game) of what a battle looks like? It would look exactly like it did for the Romans the Hunic invasions. For the Chinese the Mongols. But at the same time, that idiosyncrasy specifically breed for that kind of warfare, can't control wide and tall empires with ease, no matter the material circumstances. With time, what remains in that land, will be neither. Not Rome, not Scythia, and also both at the same time.
One may also think about how much government even matter. They are different configurations of policies you discover and adopt through the game depending on how well they fit your your broader strategies and challenges. But in the end, they don't change much. At the end of the day, it's still an omnipotent abstract God who decides what is done in the name and overly concerned about intuitive ideas about "efficiency" and even "fun", and increasingly I have that same sensation in our actual world (despite who or what makes the actual act or decision); with the important or maybe not so important distinction that such deity is somehow emergent from the aggregate of human decisions and collective unconscious.
The game is flexible enough to emergently present to you certain patterns of history, but the technology ends there. It's incapable to imagine a world where things didn't go, even when capable to guide you towards different explanations of how did it go and how could it didn't. It's not even about the limitations of game mechanics. The same flaw is in every single book and essay written about history in... well, in all of history. That's exacerbated by the fact that I run custom settings on my games. I play with no mods, no game-modes active, on Pangaea and with the maximum numbers of civs both the game and my poor computer can handle in an standard map. So the world is packed. I am trying to recreate the world of Machiavelli, there princes constantly fight for power and the struggle provides a natural selective force towards survival. And see what does.
But still, the improvisational pathway is not void of consequences. In fact, it is more tied than anything to the waves of determinism; either towards reaching the dream of flight or towards facing the forgetful sands of time. Maybe both. Maybe both.
mucha droga tas tomao tu
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